In this double review of exhibitions by Camille Henrot and Hannah Höch on display in East London galleries this spring, Josephine Berry Slater sees how differently the art of combination can be plied by artists working a century apart

Do algorithms think? Do buildings speculate? In his review of Luciana Parisi’s recent book, Contagious Architecture, Jeremy Lecomte considers her claim that parametric architecture is a mode of algorithmic computation that should be understood as speculative thought

A new archivist has been appointed. But has anyone actually appointed him? Is he not rather acting on his own instructions?... He will not concern himself with what previous archivists have treated in a thousand different ways: propositions and phrases. He will ignore both the vertical hierarchy of propositions which are stacked on top of one another, and the horizontal relationship established between phrases in which each seems to respond to another.

Harry Sanderson reflects on the economy of networked image commodities and the chains of labour which underpin their appearance

There is a relation, largely avoided and unexplored, between the ubiquity of digital commodities, and the capacity of these devices to reproduce and maintain a necessary insouciance towards the exploitation and violence required for their continued production.

Is the age of accelerationist finance and High Frequency Trading really a kind of science fiction, or is it more like (digitalised) Tolkien? Benedict Seymour offers a Marxist-Tolkienist satire of algorithmic reaction, humanist bourgeoisdom, and expanding non-reproduction. Illustrations by Rona Tunnadine

The Mute magazine print archive has its first release for sale as an original, limited edition set of all fifty-one issues of the print versions of the magazine, covering twenty years of publishing from 1994 to 2014. Full Details